But Lane was made of sterner stuff. She had been deeply sinned against, it was true, but she had been a great sinner herself. She had been the victim of a tragic set of circumstances which might well have appalled the bravest woman, but in her selfish desire to keep herself afloat, she had chosen the line of least resistance. Apart from her lapse into actual criminal courses, there were three things he could not forgive her for, her callous abandonment of her child, the son of a felon it is true, but still “flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone”; the equally callous sacrifice of Richard Croxton; her unscrupulous conduct in marrying Morrice, an honourable and upright man, under false pretences. True, that if she had told him the truth about her past he would not have married her, but it was little short of dastardly to involve him in her own unhappy career. Anticipating that he would have no difficulty in wringing the truth out of her, Lane had brought with him the confession ready written for her to sign. But, before handing it to her, he had a few questions to put upon collateral points. “Before you embarked upon these robberies, Mrs. Morrice, you had to obtain possession of the two keys and get duplicates made. That was rather a difficult matter, wasn’t it?” Not so very difficult, he learned. Mr. Morrice was a very careless man in some respects, and he was so confident nobody but himself and Richard was acquainted with the mechanism of the safe, that he was incautious in small details. He frequently left his key lying about in his room when he went up to the City. Richard was not quite so careless, but occasionally he did the same. The moment Mrs. Morrice—ever on the watch—got hold of them, Sir George was ’phoned for to come to the house, and the rest was easy. “And now tell me about those finger-prints of the man ‘Tubby’ Thomas who was in Dartmoor at the time the robberies were committed. What was the motive of that, and how were they obtained?” The answer to this question involved a longer explanation. It was done, as Lane had rightly suspected, as a mere act of devilment, for the purpose of making a fool for the moment of any agent of the law who might be called in by Mr. Morrice. It had succeeded temporarily in making a fool of the astute detective himself. The _modus operandi_ was as follows: Young Archie Brookes, to call him by his assumed name, had provided her with a pair of surgical rubber gloves upon which a copy of the expert robber’s finger-prints had been impressed. How were they obtained? Sir George, who took a great interest in the science of identifying latent finger-prints, had procured those of the notorious “Tubby,” with whom he had maintained some sort of association before his conviction, and had very cleverly reproduced them upon the thin rubber gloves. “It would appear, then, that your pretended relative by marriage was the friend of crooks; were you aware of this, Mrs. Morrice?”